Equipment

[Billz]

Why make items player made be just as good as ones that a monster that took 30 people to kill? Its stupid mmorpg is to have groups of people killing stuff or adventuring not having one person sit in a town watching tv combining items. Im not saying its wrong but if equipment can be made better or just as good as monster dropped then no one will group together to kill anything everyone will be soloing which makes the game boring.

Even if you added a couple big monsters in the game that dropped some magical items with affects on the armor or weapons that would give people a chance to come together and take down somthing that isnt everyday experince points. You dont even have to make them respawn have somthing els big spawn somwhere els that is different in looks, level and skill.

EverQuest did a great job in doing this thats why so many people STILL play the game today and will play it for a long time. Games like Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot are going no where because all people do is max there skills and have nothing to do but pvp which gets extemly boring because everyone has the same gear so all you do is kill the same uber gimp that looks exactly like the next guy.

[Rend]

there is no spawning of monsters. So... no grouping to kill the same monster over and over to get its items.

[z_man93]

You should be able to create awesome pieces of armor just sitting in town. Thats the point of having skills. If monsters had items far better than what could be made by characters then the game would take a one dimensional personality as everyone would be hunting the same monsters and not exploring other skills.

The thing is... if collecting items is the point of the game then there really isn't much to the game. In most MMORPGs skills, levels, experience, are all capped. So once you reach the maximum level on all your skills, all you can do is collect stuff. Not very interesting. Arcanity will erase the problem of reaching maximum character development and hopefully keep things more interesting.

[Rolfe]

To address the concern of lack of incentive for grouping:

One of the major goals of Arcanity is to create what we call "Adventure-Based Play". There are a lot of essentials involved with ensuring that Adventure-Based Play carries over into Adventure Parties. I won't go into specifics, but if it's done properly, the feeling of adventure will be as much an incentive as anything else could be. In other words, there should incentive to form an Adventure Party in the actual game play. Forming an adventure party and venturing out with the party should be fun, so much so as to create incentive enough. If we're able to bring our ideas to life effectively, there will be much more to incentive that just an uber item or 2.

But you want to know what tangible (so to speak) payoff could possibly be involved if we don't have uber items littering the dungeons, right? That is, what is the gold, xp, or equipment incentive to form an Adventure Party and venture deep into some deadly dungeon? The most unique thing we have planned is to have lootable treasure chests in dungeons. Players would get gold, gems, jewelry and even XP for looting these treasure chests. There will also be treasure-hoarding monsters in dungeons that protect significant sums of gold, gems and jewelry. There's a good chance that Adventure Partying will turn out to be the generally most effective way of increasing your wealth. There will be occasional unique items- equipment, armor, weapons, etc- but, as Z already stated, collecting these items is not meant to be the focus of the game.